


Coda

by CoraxAviary



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Role Reversal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28120728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoraxAviary/pseuds/CoraxAviary
Summary: A role-reversal fic. Speirs is plucked from the enlistment pool to train as a medic. Roe goes to officer candidate school. Both end up making their way into Easy Company, because even in an alternate time, they still will find their way home.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13
Collections: Heavy Artillery Holiday Exchange 2020





	Coda

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carlough](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carlough/gifts).



“You’re being transferred.”

Ron’s eyes flick down to the desk separating him and the CO – laid upon the surface are the files determining the future of his enlistment, with a different company. Different men. 

Ron stands up straighter, stiffening his spine and looking forward with hard eyes.

Apparently Dog doesn’t need him anymore. Easy is short a medic, and the ratio of medic-to-fighting man is all that mattered to the brass. Ron sucks in a breath and lets it out. It doesn’t pain him to let Dog go – it just seems a little sudden. That’s all.

“Private Speirs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Gather your belongings. You are to report to the Easy barracks by…” The officer checks his watch. “Nineteen-hundred.” He looks back up at Ron. “You’ll continue training there with the other Easy medics.”

Ron looks the other CO in the eye, feeling something stirring inside. Is it irritation? Disappointment? He centers his gaze on his commanding officer’s face – no, his former commanding officer. He is no longer in his company. 

“Yes, sir.”

“You are dismissed, Private.”

“Sir.” Ron nods once, quick and sure, and pushes down the feeling right as he identifies it. It is the rare throb of trepidation that has flowed, itching, under his spine like a minor hum of anxiety. It is always like this when he meets someone new: the urge to regard them as a free variable – unpredictable until Ron can know them and trust them. Now, he is to enter a whole other company–full of them. A hundred men. They are supposed to trust him with their lives. They are supposed to– 

Ron gives himself a shake, blinking rapidly. He turns to the officer, watching him with an expectant gaze. 

Ron opens his mouth to say something – he doesn’t know, something to acknowledge his transfer even though it might have been considered speaking out of turn – when the officer speaks into the silence of the office. 

“Sometimes I think you would have made a good officer.”

Something flashes behind Ron’s eyes – a series of memories, scattering like leaves caught in the gyre of a drafty tunnel. Spinning out of reach. Voices. Monotony. Anger. 

Ron looks at the officer, something pushing at the edges of his gaze. A future that could have been. He swallows it down. 

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ve been good, Private. Good luck with Easy.”

Ron nods again, singularly, and then snaps his heels together and lifts a hand in salute. He turns abruptly and leaves the office. 

+

The pained shouts of a single man float over the brush and through the trees, haunting and miserable. All the men can do is listen and hunker down. Somehow this moment of night, silent except for rustling birds, the shifting of leaves, and the breath of hundreds of huddling American paratroopers, is broken by those sobbing screams and the chaos that lies somewhere out of sight. All they can do is imagine what is happening and why the man keeps screaming. Someone calls for a medic. One is probably already on their way.

The night is deep and dark and almost like a void. Things howl and shriek and crawl and buzz in the featureless black, and the French countryside has taken on a dreamlike quality that Gene has only experienced in moments of dire but almost arbitrary intensity. Most of those moments have consisted of bone-chilling fear as he skirted the Louisiana bayou at an indeterminable time of night, seeing the candle pinpricks of gator eyes drifting through the marsh. The way the sky pulls away from the ground means that he doesn’t know where land stops and the water begins. 

Now, it’s in a vastly different place that smells like a different type of blue-green instead of the golden-green of the Atchafalaya, where the winds take on a sharp quality and are not soft at the edges. Still, it’s the same bone deep fear that is unique to a certain time of trance inducing night, and another broken off sob floats off towards the skies. 

Gene crashes through the leaves as covertly as he can, moving towards the sound. Whoever is screaming needs to be quiet, Gene thinks, even though each new scream is like a lance of pain through his heart. He tries to block out the sound, to no avail. Gene doesn’t know if he has the stomach to be an officer, if every time he hears screaming men he is this concerned, but the self-doubt fades away into horrified concern when he finally breaks through the wall of brush where the noise is the loudest and happens upon the scene. 

“You need to calm down, soldier,” murmurs a quiet but gruff voice, right from at the source of the screams. The shouts, though, have calmed to something more like whimpers and occasional shrieks through clenched teeth whenever the medic moves to press something against the wounded man. Someone else is standing off to the side, wearing what could only be described as an agonized expression. Or guilt-stricken.

“What happened here?” asks Gene. He squints. “Tab?”

“Yes, sir,” grits out Tab. He groans as the medic takes ahold of his poncho roughly and tears it to get at the wound more easily. “He–” Tab lifts a shaking arm towards the man – Smith – standing off to the side, now being quietly talked to by another officer. “He stabbed me.”

Smith starts to shake his head. “I didn’t mean to, sir–” he starts, but Gene sighs, sliding a shaking hand under the brim of his helmet to wipe tiredly at his eyes, and another officer is already there, dealing with whatever can be done after one soldier accidentally stabs another – quite possibly fatally. It’s not exactly alright, so Gene doesn’t say so, and he moves away from Smith with a stab in his gut, as if he should be able to find the words to make the situation less dire. 

Gene walks over to Tab, and there is a telltale glimmer of something wet, something pooling and thick, all about the surface of his clothes. Gene almost reaches down to put a hand on Tab’s shoulder, but the medic bats Gene away suddenly, and the impact of his arm against Gene’s hand jolts him out of whatever stunned reverie he was entering. It’s Speirs, Gene realizes, squinting through the darkness to make out the dark eyes under the helmet. Speirs is pressing down firmly on Tab, winding bandages around his torso and some cotton pads. 

“Hold this,” says Speirs abruptly, and Gene finds his hands guided by Speirs. He feels the sudden wet warmth of the blood. Gene doesn’t find it disgusting – he finds it concerning. Tab is still gasping something awful. Gene can’t even start to imagine the pain of having multiple entry wounds from a bayonet just gaping in his torso. 

Speirs is silent as he finishes the job, tying off the excess bandage with a twist that isn’t exactly savage, but not as if he is trying to be soft about it. Tab hisses, and Speirs seems to pause for a second. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, in one of the most genuine, broken tones Gene has ever heard. These medics – they face blood and gore and death every day and are tasked with the insurmountable job of hauling men back from the edge of eternity with only prayers to time and God. Speirs clears his throat. “You’ll be better in no time, Tab.” His eyes glitter from underneath the shadow of his helmet, and it’s almost like the darkness clings to Speirs, drawing him back from the men and into the shadow realm. 

Tab whines a _thanks_ , and he’s hauled back from the front line. Speirs sits there quietly, with bloodied hands and a grim, blank stare, peering out into the treeline of the opposing side of the meadow, where the Germans wait with longsuffering – but not infinite patience. 

“Good job, Doc,” says Gene, barely above a whisper. Now that Tab is gone, the night has settled back to a quiet that seems taboo to break. 

“Thank you, sir,” says Speirs, barely audible. 

Gene tries to look more closely at Speirs, but his helmet and his position crouched among the leaves obscure the majority of his face from Gene’s vision. Gene looks away and tells himself that he’s being much too concerned. 

“Get some rest,” says Gene. 

“Sir,” acknowledges Speirs. 

And Gene goes back to his position farther down the line. 

It’s wet and miserable most of the rest of the night. Gene makes his covert rounds about the platoon, checking to see if morale is at least slightly intact. He knows the chocolate Liebgott has is probably pilfered, but he won’t say so. It’s a morale booster, he’s been told by the upper division. 

He finds Blithe staring blankly at the other side of the foxhole, frozen around his garand and looking worse for wear since the last time Speirs treated him. Somehow talking to Lieutenant Winters had resulted in a miraculous regaining of his eyesight. Gene doesn’t know how exactly, but Blithe does not seem exactly vigilant now. He is partner-less, looking soggy, dismal, and despondent. 

Gene crouches at the edge of the hole. “Hey, Blithe,” he whispers. 

Blithe blinks rapidly and looks up suddenly, rifle rattling in his frantic clutches until he registers that the shape of a man against the trees is his lieutenant. 

“Sir,” he seems to get out. 

“How you feelin?” Gene tries, not wanting to make Blithe more hopeless than he already is. 

“I’m alright, sir,” says Blithes, straightening a little in the mud. “What– what’s goin on?”

Gene pauses, wonders how to talk to Blithe. He was never good at comfort, he agonizes, fiddling with the corner of his uniform momentarily. Words are paltry in these circumstances – they’re worthless in the face of greater threats, like death. 

“It’s all taken care of, Private,” manages Gene. 

Blithe nods absently. 

Gene pauses and looks down into the hole again. It isn’t exactly inappropriate for someone of his rank, but… He sighs, slides all the way down into the base of the foxhole, and sits next to Blithe in the small muddy space. All Gene has to offer is a small bit of body heat, because he doesn’t have words. He can’t offer hope, either. Just some presence. Blithe is surprised but relaxes after a few moments. 

“Thank you, sir.”

“Ain’t nothing to thank me for, Blithe.”

Gene stares at the stained palms of his hands for a while, turning them over and scratching off what he can. The night is damp and blue-dark and hollow, and it’s a waiting game. So all Gene can do is consider his hands, consider Tab, and consider the way that he feels like a directionless boat in the sea of helplessness, regardless of the hierarchy of the Army that never afforded him the safety of structure he originally hoped it would. 

He just wishes these men would live. 

That’s all. He knows it might be too much to ask God, too selfish, but he sends a prayer up to the heavens anyway, through the dark night of war. 

+

No, he cannot stay. The idea in itself burns like an affront in Ron’s head the longer he thinks about it. _Stay?_ He wants to scream, but of course he never does. Instead, he grits his teeth hard and paces about in the snow, kicking up clods in what might be an impractical waste of valuable energy and warmth. 

Somewhere along the stay in the Bois Jacques, shivering has become such a commonplace state of being that the men just accept it as a part of life. Ron is no less affected, and he clenches his molars together harder in an effort to keep them from clacking together. It’s no matter – he can’t tell if he’s shaking anymore on a regular basis, so he gives in to an urge and yawns despite his state of heightened anxiety. He immediately regrets it. A deep sting of icy-cold air punches violently down his throat, and Ron closes his mouth with a snap, biting off the puff of steam that rises from his mouth. He coughs – allows himself three – and then represses the rest, opting to just sit deep in the mounds of drifting powder, wringing his hands and listening to the heavy blanket of buzzing quiet. 

_Stay_. Ron looks almost ragefully across the barren white of the washed-out networks of trees and icy snow. He squeezes one hand in the other especially hard, and feels the hardness of his fingernails barely through the numbness of his bloodless fingers. 

Well, they aren’t exactly bloodless, Ron absently thinks, relinquishing his grip to stare at his open palms. They are streaked with an almost permanent blood – the product of his helplessness, Ron thinks savagely. He can never save enough men. They just keep slipping through. 

He can’t tell himself to try harder anymore, because he’s been pushed to the very edges of himself, and he can feel himself unraveling like the threads in his worn uniform. But every other man in the pale bright hell of Bastogne has too, and Ron must be different because of the red and white band around his arm. They picked him for this. Plucked him out of the enlisted pool and assigned him here. And his job is to save, not to pity. 

He balls his hands into fists and shoves them into the pockets of his jacket in an attempt to find some warmth. It’s maybe a degree warmer inside the pockets than outside, and Ron finds a tree to slide down against, propping himself up against the trunk and balancing on the balls of his feet, sinking down in the icy snow so that his calves are touching the top of the powder pack. 

It’s faint but it slices through the thickness of the ambient quiet. The sound of popping and firing – the sound of contact with Krauts. 

Ron sucks in one breath before he’s on his feet, moving automatically towards the sound of violence. Wherever there is death, he will be there. It’s his medic’s promise and his claim to duty. Through danger and fire.

He will be there.

He races through the snow, blind. _Routine patrol_ , Ron thinks as he skirts trees and sinks into pits filled with freezing power, wrenching himself out of holes and stumbling through the blinding white. Soon he sees the footsteps of the patrol, already softening at the edges with new snowfall, and he follows the path like it’s his salvation, clinging to the imprints as the sound of firing grows in his ears, louder and louder. Panic rises in Ron’s ears, like an ocean of alarm, and he pushes through the trees with greater fear. He closes his eyes for one second and feels the waves of the battle wash over him and drown him. 

He is submerged, and he takes another breath, surges through a cover of mist, and arrives at the scene of the battle. 

There is screaming and yelling and shouts to pull back from the patrol. There are German voices, alarmingly near, and they are also in tones of panic, though nothing is as immediate as the stark contrast of red blood against the white snow. A soldier is laying in the center of the firefight, struggling and bleeding rapidly – American, Ron identifies quickly. He dives into a crouch behind a fallen tree, arms over his neck and head. Half of the patrol is pinned down behind another trunk, yelling and waving at each other and screaming over the din of bullets and rifles. And one young soldier craning around the log as bullets ricochet around him, sending wood splintering into the air, and reaching for his fallen brother. 

Ron risks a look around the log. The man is bleeding out, profusely. He is clutching at his neck and Ron sees a flash of free-flowing, spurting blood and a sliver of tendon or bone through the hole in his neck. 

He is a medic, and he sees these things happen over and over. But a large part of him screams _not again_ , and it is all Ron can do to keep himself from avenging this man – this soldier, this _boy_ Julian, at least the name Babe is screaming over and over as he reaches for him, and it is actually more than Ron can take. 

_First, do no harm,_ Ron says over and over in his mind, and it’s almost like he’s watching from a detached place when he takes a calculated risk with little more than a blink, seeing an opening and taking it. He dives out from behind the log, and the men spot him for the first time. Ron knows the medic band around his arm will not do much against the Germans, but he throws himself into the fray anyway, eyes fixed on Julian, laying in the bull’s-eye center of the firefight.. 

There are yells from the Easy men for him to stop. He knows. Ron knows. He knows more than anyone the cost. 

_I know_ , he wants to yell back. _But I must save_. And so he runs and runs and there is a lost rifle, maybe Julian’s, in the snow in front of him, and Ron picks it up without a second thought and takes out the nearest German soldier with a neat bullet to the head. A second, across the clearing, firing from a position almost hidden behind a trunk. Ron doesn’t stop and doesn’t look where his bullets are going, though – he comes to his destination and skids on the ice, dropping the rifle. 

He slides and crashes down into the bloody slush around Julian, up to it on his hands and knees, and already hovering over Julian while the bullets whiz overhead, puncturing Ron’s uniform with their closeness and somehow missing the mark by God’s divine, humorless will, and all Ron can do is crouch over Julian while he tries to breathe, eyes fixing on Ron’s face as the remnants of his shredded windpipe flutter with the trembling spasms of a dying creature. Ron clutches at Julian’s face with hands he knows are freezing and blood-dirtied, and his face is so painfully fearful as his eyes defocus and take on that infinite, sorrowful, transcendent look of death. Julian can’t speak or tear his own finger away from his throat, but Ron holds Julian close, and Julian’s focus on Ron’s eyes slips away. 

Ron knows Julian is going to die. No one recovers from getting their neck so heavily lacerated beyond repair. There is nothing he can do, logically. But it still aches harder and deeper in his bones as Julian’s sight finally glazes over in infinite rest, with tracers and booms and the light of the sun in nimbus overhead, as if he died in a barrage of glory. 

The glory of war has long faded for all of Easy. There is nothing for the American soldiers in Europe except destruction. Easy is the grim tip of a worn spear. They fall from the heavens like birds shot out of the sky. The way they used to worship their commissions is gone, replaced with a sense of peaceless duty, all to end up in some French forest halfway across the world, dying in the snow. 

It’s a heavy irony, Ron thinks, that it’s cold enough in Bastogne to give men frostbite, but not cold enough to freeze warm blood when men are hemorrhaging.

There are a few more gunshots and then silence: the German patrol has been taken out, or maybe the others who are not dead have run back through the trees in the general direction of their front lines. There’s carnage in the clearing, and Ron is the cause. 

He didn’t go along with the patrol in the first place. He could have done something if he was with them, right? He would have been able to drag Julian back, maybe. Take up a gun and be an extra hand in battle. And now Americans and Germans lie dead, in equal measure. 

It was supposed to be routine. 

Ron fights the urge to let out an agonized yell and clenches his teeth like always, trembling, looking down into Julian’s eyes. The boy has become eternal. The rest of Easy are still grounded on Earth, at least for a time. Ron swipes a red hand over Julian’s pale bloodless eyelids, leaving a dirty stripe of blood over his face. 

He looks down at the body again. He’s powerless in the face of war. Just a medic. If life is supposed to sit on his shoulder, Ron is beginning to feel as if that was a lie. He’s a herald of death – unable to save, leading fate and pain like the leader of a pack. An angel of death sits on his shoulder. 

Ron stands and lifts Julian. He’s light – not much muscle. The pickings were slim, and Julian was a replacement. His body probably didn’t even have any time to adjust to the field diet, let alone the runs in supply out here in Bastogne. The others are staring, and Ron doesn’t care. The rifle Ron used sits partially buried in the snow. The Germans he killed are sprawled among the tree line. 

Surely _do not harm_ doesn’t apply to the enemy. After all, they are all soldiers. And they were sent to Europe to kill, not to save. 

Ron was a medic, but that was by chance. 

Someone picked his name by closing their eyes and pointing at names on a roster. Ron tells himself that he’s just as entitled to fire bullets at the enemy as any other enlisted man. Any other officer. 

+

He likes the shiny stuff, Gene observes. Speirs is turned around, pawing through a drawer of silverware. Doc Speirs was somewhat of an enigma. 

“No, sir. There are beds in the back. You can go rest in the back rooms,” Speirs says over his shoulder at Lipton.

“I’m fine, Doc,” attempts Lipton before dissolving into a concerning coughing fit. Luz is bustling around in the back, so Gene pounds Lipton’s back before being waved off. 

“You’re not fine,” says Speirs dismissively. “You need to rest in order for that pneumonia to run its course.” He had turned around sometime during Lipton’s coughing and is now looking rather intently at Lipton’s face. Lipton weakly pushes at Speirs. Speirs deposits the silverware on the table with a metallic clatter and crouches down to place the back of his hand on Lipton’s forehead, testing for fever. 

Gene moves away, because he has to deal with some more officer things. The last thing he hears before leaving the room is Speirs messing around with the blankets that are draped around Lipton. 

It’s a strange dichotomy: the way Speirs is simultaneously intimidating and tender. Gene sees the men obeying Speirs without question. On dark nights when the medic materializes out of the trees to ask the men for extra morphine syrettes, face streaked with grease paint and eyes obscured by his helmet, he receives them without any complaint. Gene sees him operate with a sense of mercenary efficiency, not sparing a word or a phrase when he could be concentrating on whatever wound he’s treating. Right now the object of his attention is Lipton, and it means that Speirs is somewhat aggressively trying to bully Lipton into a bed instead of letting him languish on a couch on the ground floor of the bombed-out house. 

It’s become informal, almost. Speirs talks to the officers as if they are only his peers. 

He is not disrespectful, Gene thinks, as he makes his way to the houses where the other enlisted men are bedding down for the night. Speirs addresses them with _sir_ as often as he needs to. It’s the way in which he prioritizes the emergency of the hour, sparing no politeness, regardless of rank, to demand extra bandages and pull hands forward to stem blood. It’s what makes him such an effective medic, Gene thinks. 

Gene wonders if he would have been a medic if he had enlisted into the Army instead of going through OCS. Would he have been picked? Would he have held up through the battles, running around under the barrage of enemy fire, leaving foxholes and running about dodging bullets and artillery if the situation called? Being a medic entailed volunteering to face down the front line all the time, exposing oneself to more danger than the typical enlisted man. 

Gene thinks that maybe he is too soft. He’s lived as an officer. He can turn away from the injuries if he wants. Speirs can’t. His job is to stare death in the face and drag all the men back from the precipice, one by one, with his elbows covered in blood. 

Gene thinks that maybe Speirs is fit to lead men – but then again, as a medic, he bears enough burdens of decision. Triage. Choosing who lives and who dies. Speirs is the arbiter that counts the breath of dying men. 

A day later when all is quiet, a man is subtracted from their numbers, and the sounds of artillery have faded, Gene is making his way back to the makeshift officer’s barracks when he spots the glow of a cigarette against the black of night. They’re not supposed to be out smoking where the Krauts can see them across the river – even a small orange spot of light can shine like a pinhole in a sheet of blackout paper. 

He slows as he gets closer, boots crunching quietly through the watery gravel of the melted-snow streets. The man’s eyes glint silently from above the cigarette, and a plume of smoke billows out from his mouth. 

“Doc?” Gene speaks first. 

“Sir,” says Speirs. He pauses, looks down, and then shifts around, putting a hand inside his jacket and pulling it out with a cigarette box in hand. “Cigarette?”

Gene stares at the box for a few seconds, murmurs of the men filtering through his mind. Once apparently Speirs had distributed some to a few prisoners-of-war. What became of them was up for debate. The gossip always went up in the ranks, and Speirs looks Gene hard in the face, as if he knows the words that swirl about him like dust in ether. 

“Sure, thanks,” murmurs Gene, gingerly fishing a single cigarette from the box and placing it in his mouth. Speirs holds up a lighter – it’s silver and flashy, Gene sees, by the brief glow of flame – and he breathes in and out with a satisfied sigh. 

There is companionable silence for a while, punctuated only by the chirping of European crickets and the hum of transport vehicles far in the distance. A bird alights in the spindly tree above, and there’s no rustle of leaves in this time of cold winter. 

There’s supposed to be a patrol tonight. It won’t happen. 

Both of them think of Jackson, or at least Gene knows Speirs is trying not to. Despite his stone-faced demeanor, Gene would like to think he knows that Speirs takes these things hard. 

“How’s Lipton?” Gene asks, breaking the silence. At least Lipton is alive, and so they will talk about him instead. 

Speirs brightens only slightly. “He’s doing alright.”

“Thanks to your skill, Doc.”

Speirs nods silently, humbly accepting the comment in stride, if a little awkwardly. “He seems to be getting better on his own. I couldn’t get any penicillin.”

It’s because of the runs in supply, Gene knows. But Speirs won’t say so, because he shoulders the responsibility heavily, alone. 

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gene watches Speirs’s hands fidget with the lighter. He has long fingers, and they play almost gracefully along the edges and surfaces rendered into the lighter casing. He suddenly remembers a similar pair of hands from his early childhood, soothing and cool. 

“Did I ever tell you about my grandmother?” Gene says suddenly. 

Speirs blinks, exhales a column of smoke. “No, sir.”

“She…” Gene trails off, struck suddenly by the oddity of the comparison. “She was a traiteur. Faith healer.”

Speirs nods. 

“She took pain away from people. Laid her hands on them.” Gene looks down at his feet, then back at Speirs. “You remind me of her.”

“Really?” says Speirs after a beat of silence, having put away the lighter. He now rubs absently at the white and red armband on his uniform, and his hand drops when he sees Gene’s eyes following the motion. 

“Maybe not of her,” Gene amends, taking another hit off the cigarette, smoke pluming up into the icy air. “Of the way she heals.”

Speirs laughs quiet and low. It’s a little hollow, a little sardonic. Not disrespectful. Sad.

“You really do,” whispers Gene, and he feels oddly like he’s finally able to put the pieces together in his mind. Speirs has reminded him of old faith healers for a while now, and he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling of familiarity. 

“Thank you,” says Speirs quietly, and somewhat unconvinced. 

“I see the way you heal, Doc,” says Gene. “You’ve saved most of us at least once.”

Speirs then looks up, finally meeting Gene’s eyes. “Couldn’t save Jackson.”

Gene blows out a long breath of smoke, and his heart aches for Jackson. His family. The rest of his close friends in the Company. But it isn’t anyone’s fault except for the war. And it’s the way it has to be. 

“Wasn’t your fault,” says Gene. 

Speirs huffs out a breath, maybe something close to a scoff. “Could’ve gotten there faster.”

“No, soldier,” says Gene. “You can’t change the past.”

Speirs drops the burnt-out end of the cigarette onto the ground, and then stamps out the glowing remnants on the damp cobblestones. There’s a long pause. Speirs seems to consider the statement, and he stands still and then looks up at the crescent moon high in the sky: a small sliver of white almost lost in the vast starry blanket of night.

“You’re right, sir.”

And with that, Gene watches Speirs turn to go back into the house, and something in him thinks that it isn’t right to end the conversation this way. 

“Wait.”

Speirs turns around, highlighted in the low glare of candlelight that comes through the cracks in the window shades, orange and yellow and spilling just a little onto the wet streets. It’s late, and Gene wants to let Speirs go to bed. He’s tired enough every day, and needs a full night’s sleep. They are all tired every day, but Speirs especially.

“You’re a good medic, Speirs. Don’t you forget.”

And Speirs smiles, if only just a slight upturn of the lips, barely visible because the moonlight is low. He nods. 

“Thank you, sir.”

Gene nods back, because it’s the only thing he can do. “Good night.”

Speirs disappears into the house, and Gene makes his way back to his barracks. And for that night, things resemble calm. 

There is no peace, because there are enemy soldiers on the opposite shore. But when Gene closes his eyes for the night and is not woken up in the middle by flack bursts and firefights, it’s as if there is peace behind his eyelids. 

Gene does not know if he would be a good medic. He does not have to wonder, and the answer doesn’t matter. Speirs is their medic, and he’s a good one. And Gene is content with this answer. 


End file.
